The Multilingual Access Model: A Model for Outreach and Services in Non-English Speaking Communities

This booklet describes and provides materials developed in the multicultural, multilingual outreach project. This project recruited and trained bilingual, bicultural advocates from several ethnic communities to provide assistance to victims of domestic violence and initiated outreach and awareness activities within the communities. The project also provided technical assistance to six other domestic violence shelters and service providers in the San Francisco area to create a coordinated citywide access plan.

The booklet has sections on: the project background, its philosophy (valuing language advocates, incorporating cultural values and making organizational commitment to diversity), development of a multilingual access model (needs assessment, agency preparation, staffing and program development), an explanation of the crucial roles of language advocates (recruiting, screening, training), and funding.

The Attachments include samples of: some citywide multilingual access models (workplan, agency workplan, and program coordinator job description); Multilingual Advocate materials (job advertisement, job announcement, application, interview); Language Advocate materials (contract, roles, time sheet, payment/reimbursement guidelines, contact sheet); and, MLAM guidelines for staff. The language material attachments also include sheets with key phrases, words or concepts used by domestic violence and sexual assault language advocates with translations from English to Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Tagalog. These key phrases translation sheets are available as six individual Adobe pdf files.

This paper is one of a series of demonstration project reports coordinated by the Public Education Technical Assistance Project of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence (NRCDV).